In the opening paragraph of his meticulous study of the Conservative Party between 1902 and 1940, John Ramsden noted that “The book does not delve into the philosophy of conservatism as such” (Ramsden 1978: ix). In justification of this approach, he related an anecdote concerning Stanley Baldwin, who led the party for around a third of the period in question. Asked about his intellectual influences by an enthusiastic young Conservative (Frank Pakenham, later, as Lord Longford, a controversial Labour peer), Baldwin paused for a moment before nominating Sir Henry Maine: “I never ceased to be grateful for all I learned from him”. Pakenham asked Baldwin what he considered to be Maine's most important insight. After a longer pause, Baldwin mentioned that Maine had established “once and for all” that human progress depended on the movement from status to contract: “He paused again and this time for quite a while, and suddenly a look of dawning horror, but at the same time of immense humanity and confederacy stole across his face. ‘Or was it’, he said leaning a little towards me, ‘or was it the other way round!’” (Ramsden 1978: ix–x).

The most likely explanation of Baldwin's behaviour is that he was teasing his visitor – an alumnus of Eton who had obtained a first-class degree in PPE from Oxford despite the distractions of the Bullingdon Club. Nobody who had ever heard of Sir Henry Maine could fail to regurgitate his most celebrated catchphrase: “from status to contract” tripped off the tongue as readily as “from Alpha to Omega”. Baldwin's pregnant pause (no doubt accompanied by a pull on his ever-present pipe) probably arose from appreciation of his own anti-intellectual intellectual joke, which conveyed a suggestion that he was wiser than Sir Henry Maine himself. Maybe Coleridge and Southey had been right, and the movement from status to contract had actually been a regressive step?

Xi Jinping often talks about the “green” BRI as a part of his vision for China's ecological civilization, which was outlined in the 2019 BRI Belt and Road Forum. In the words of the person tasked with instrumentalizing this vision, it establishes “a green consensus with BRI participating countries, strengthens cooperation on global biodiversity conservation, and moves together towards the 2050 vision of ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ and pursues the goals of the UN's Agenda for Sustainable Development” (Xi 2019). Indeed, much of the discussion on “BRI 2.0” is centred around China's new commitments to sustainability (Ang 2019).

The BRI has so far created a small network of environmental initiatives: the BRI Green Development Coalition, the BRI Environmental Big Data Platform and the Green Silk Road Envoys Program that provides training for participating government officials. At the same time though, the BRI – a massive infrastructural initiative geared towards energy and transport sectors – is going to affect ecosystems from China to Chile. China's domestic environmental record is improving of late but only after decades of an outright war on nature in the pursuit of development (Watts 2010). This raises concerns about the capacity of various green “bolt- ons” to mitigate the sheer destructive power of rapid industrial development. The argument is convincing: if China failed to protect its own environment, why would Chinese companies be more environmentally minded elsewhere, especially in countries with weak regulatory systems (which abound on the Belt and Road)?

In some ways, this argument is unfair to China. Historically, economic development brought about environmental destruction, followed only later by the willingness and ability to repair some of the damage – a pattern known as the “environmental Kuznets curve” (named so after the more famous Kuznets curve correlating inequality and development). Following this line of reasoning, if the BRI brings about economic development in the “dirty” sectors of energy and transport, some envir-onmental degradation is expected and would have happened anyway. We could also add that China's development was partly facilitated by the displacement of polluting industries from more developed econ-omies, so it is not surprising that the West's dirty hand- me- downs are now being passed on to a new group of developers willing to trade the environment for industrial development.

By 1926, the descendants of Sir Robert Peel no longer occupied the property, Drayton Manor, whose purchase had guaranteed the family a seat in the House of Commons. Peel's stately pile was pulled down; only the clock tower remained to record the passing of time since the composition of the Tamworth Manifesto. After a sale in 1947 Drayton Manor was redeveloped as an amusement park. In 2020, while Boris Johnson's Conservative government was facing up to the task of “taking back control” from the EU, Peel's old property was acquired by a company with headquarters in Paris.

Just two years before the destruction of Drayton Manor Stanley Baldwin had evoked the sights and sounds of England. To the immemorial cry of the corncrake and the plough team rumbling over the hill, he could have added the destruction of historic houses as a phenomenon which was becoming increasingly familiar. The new burden of taxation, thanks particularly to death duties, had taken its toll on the aristocracy. The old ruling class was losing what was left of its political power and its fate was a matter of public indifference; the idea of preserving the past as a resource for future generations only took root after the Second World War. In England, more than a thousand historic houses were demolished during the twentieth century, and the losses in Scotland were proportionally higher.

These developments obviously held much more than symbolic importance, yet rumours of the death of “Conservative England” only began to circulate among journalists after the party's mauling in the 1997 general election (Wheatcroft 2005). Evidently the assumption that the Conservative Party always embodied “conservatism” had become so prevalent that such commentators would not be able to certify the death of an ideological tradition until the organization finally disbanded or (as it could easily have done on several occasions since the 1830s) adopted a less misleading name. It was not suggested that, in the process of killing the Liberal Party in the first half of the twentieth century, the Conservatives had found it necessary to adopt the ideological outlook of their less fortunate rivals.

In December 2019, it looked as if the British Conservative Party had performed a feat of electoral escapology to match anything in its long history. The party had been in office since 2010, but never with a secure parliamentary majority. Its implementation of dramatic cuts in public spending – “austerity” – had incurred considerable public hostility during its coalition with the Liberal Democrats (2010–15), and although the party won a narrow overall majority in May 2015 the ensuing months were dominated by a bitter internal debate over an impending referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union (EU). When this took place in June 2016 a small majority of those who voted rejected the advice of the prime minister, David Cameron, and opted for withdrawal. Theresa May, chosen as Cameron's successor in preference to more colourful candidates, was unable to recreate a semblance of unity among her own party, let alone the public; a “snap” election called in 2017 in order to bolster her parliamentary position had the opposite effect. From the ensuing constitutional melee over the implementation of “Brexit”, none of the branches of British government emerged with enhanced public esteem; baulked by parliament and the courts, May had exhausted her personal authority long before standing down in July 2019.

To its critics – and, indeed, to many senior figures in its own ranks – this was a mess almost entirely of the Conservative Party's own making. The erstwhile “party of Europe”, and its allies in the mainstream media, had developed an obsession with the EU, ensuring that this potent source of division was a constant presence in the newspaper headlines which confronted a largely uncomprehending electorate. Spooked after 2012 by a surge in media and public support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which made their own brand of “Euroscepticism” seem tepid, the Conservatives had responded by giving the voters a chance to channel their varied resentments into a one-off, single-issue decision. Cameron had been so confident of a victory for “Remain” that no serious preparations had been made in case the verdict went the other way.

In a debate of 31 May 1866, the Liberal MP John Stuart Mill intervened to clarify an earlier remark he had made about the Conservative Party, which, he feared, “has some appearance of being less polite than I should wish always to be”. In describing the opposition as “the stupidest party”, he had not meant “that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it”. In fact, Conservatives should celebrate their stupidity, which helped to explain their political success: “there is a dense solid force in sheer stupidity – such, that a few able men, with that force pressing behind them, are assured of victory in many a struggle” (Hansard HC Deb., 31 May 1866).

Mill's celebrated sally might have entertained MPs on his own side of the House, but in essence it reheated an argument which had appeared in print way back in 1840. His celebrated essay on Coleridge (see Chapter 1) implied that conservatives were “bigots” who could only find intellectual and moral salvation in teachings which were infused with liberalism (Mill 1840: 300–302). Mill seemed generally bemused to find that a conservative, like Coleridge, could have written anything worth reading.

By 1866 Mill had more reason for regarding Coleridge as a freakish exception to conservative stupidity, because no thinker of comparable stature had emerged in the interim. Indeed, Coleridge's best-known intellectual disciples, like the Christian socialist F. D. Maurice, and the liberal Thomas Arnold of Rugby School fame, had incorporated elements of his work within different ideological frameworks, while W. E. Gladstone had seen the error of his ways and at the time of Mill's speech was chancellor of the exchequer in a Liberal government. In part, the lack of an obvious successor to Coleridge (or indeed to Southey) reflected the dominant role in political debate of the periodical press. The typical contribution was an extended essay dealing with contemporary issues rather than fundamental principles (McDowell 1959).

Since the 1990s, researchers, commentators and politicians have been asking the question “What does China want?” What are China's ambitions and goals, given its dramatic ascendance as an economic superpower? And is its “peaceful rise” possible? (Segal 1999; Johnston 2003; Buzan 2010; Brown 2017). Following the collapse of the USSR, the first version of the “China Threat scenario” emerged among US conservative policy circles, but China's increasing openness after Tiananmen, culminating in its 2001 entry into the WTO, rendered it irrelevant until the end of the Hu- Wen era.

The 2010s, however, witnessed an increasing alarmism about the rapidly expanding presence of Chinese economic actors globally. When US anxiety focused mainly on the military and political rise of China, its seemingly capitalist economy had provided a much- needed tonic to calm the nerves. But now a more robust rearticulation of the China Threat idea stated that Chinese activities in the economic field also hide malicious intentions. Under this prism, the BRI is seen as the economic pillar of Xi Jinping's grand strategy to reshape the global balance of power to China's favour. The group supporting this view could not be more diverse, including voices from the left, centre, right and far- right of the political spectrum.

Is the BRI really a strategy, perhaps even a “grand” one? Can it reveal to us China's plans and intentions? We will confront this question by starting from the notion of “grand strategy” itself. The study of “grand strategy” can help analyze a country's intentions by taking a step back and getting a more holistic perspective on whether a unified picture exists or not, thereby linking together different pieces of the puzzle. However, the idea of a grand strategy can also act as a lens that distorts reality to provide justification for a certain policy preference. Think, for instance, about the Cold War era “domino theory”, which assumed that the USSR's grand strategy was to export revolution to different parts of the world and set up puppet regimes controlled by Moscow. This assumption distorted the nature of anticolonial struggles in places such as Vietnam and provided the rationale for the US military intervention.

A train of thought that presents China's global economic activities as an attempt at political domination has become commonplace over the last decade. Books, journal articles, policy reports and political speeches from around the world began to warn of China's new- found assertiveness. At the same time, Xi Jinping suddenly seemed eager to loudly proclaim his ambitions and emerge from the sidelines of global politics. Take the examples above, which suggest China used economic power as a way to acquire a political foothold in Greece (where even Xerxes failed, no less). What motives might the authors be suggesting? To what ends will this “political foothold” be used? Will China build a new Sinocentric world order? Will it push out the US and the West, one country at a time? Will it write the last chapter of its long revenge for the century of humiliation? This appealing argument has captured public imagination about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, the Initiative, sometimes called “OBOR” due to its Mandarin name yi dai yi lu 一带一路, literally “One Belt One Road”). However, there are four main problems with the logic behind this perception that prompted us to write this book at the end of the BRI's first decade.

The first issue is that this narrative is self- perpetuating and addictive. If we start off believing that Chinese activities are part of an imperialist plan to dominate the world, we can easily pile up evidence that this is happening simply by reframing all economic deals, loans, trade agreements and new infrastructure projects as shrewd moves on a global chessboard.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been defined as “a voluntary set of practices by which corporations establish criteria and goals beyond their primary aim of making a profit when planning and enacting their business strategies” (Taylor & Rioux 2018: 172). These practices usually refer to promoting environmental goals, human rights, fair labour standards and the interests of local communities (ibid.: 172– 3). In theory, CSR goals are integrated into the entire operation process and supply chain, from planning to execution and its aftermath. Codes of conduct, routine monitoring, audits and investigations in response to complaints are the main tools that companies have at their disposal. In practice, however, this reliance on voluntary self- regulation has proven to be inadequate and, as many cases of violations of human and labour rights have demonstrated, even large corporations with strong CSR mechanisms struggle to meet the goals they have set themselves.

At its core, CSR is about branding, creating a positive corporate image for consumers (ibid.: 178). When used exclusively as a public relations mechanism, it fuels justified cynicism. In such cases, the logic of profit maximization often drives the exploitation of workers and local communities, overriding any CSR goals. Negative externalities affecting communities and workers can be intentional (e.g., essential to profitability) or unintentional, resulting from inadequate oversight of the business operations, or both, when multiple levels of oversight are involved. Whatever the case, however, they may cause significant reputational and financial damage to individual corporations and projects.

In this chapter, we turn to the issue of the BRI's social responsibility by focusing on two dimensions, human rights and labour, for which the Initiative continues to attract considerable criticism. A key theme of this book is that the BRI is an extension of China's economically successful experience with development. But, as argued throughout, this is not just a “copy- paste” process in which China exports its practices, regulations and standards alongside its investments, what is referred to as a process of “Sinification”. Instead, we observe a complex dynamic of negotiation and adaptation in the local contexts of host states under the pressure of global capitalism, transnational institutions and local agendas.

Throughout her premiership, Margaret Thatcher led a party in which, according to Philip Norton (1990), only 19 per cent of Conservative MPs and ministers fully shared and supported her political views and vision, yet she and her eponymous ideology enjoyed considerable dominance, both intellectually and in terms of policy objectives (the parliamentary rejection of the 1986 Shops Bill to legalize Sunday trading was Thatcher’s only parliamentary defeat in the 1980s). Seven factors underpinned this dominance, and thereby the entrenchment of Thatcherism until it had established intellectual hegemony and a path-dependency, namely: (1) her allocation of cabinet posts and ministerial portfolios; (2) her combative style in chairing cabinet meetings, ministerial committees or conducting bilateral meetings with individual ministers to determine policy; (3) the recruitment of ideologically-aligned special advisers (SPADS) to the Downing Street Policy Unit and, sometimes, elsewhere in Whitehall; (4) the successful manner in which she responded to specific major events or crises which might have undermined other prime ministers; (5) the loyalty of most Conservative MPs whose support was extensively based on her electoral success rather than wholehearted or fervent ideological agreement; (6) the extent to which her critics and opponents in the parliamentary Conservative Party both underestimated her sheer determination and tenacity, and were unable to articulate a coherent or convincing alternative; and (7) the weakness of the non-Conservative opposition generally, not only ideologically and in terms of (lack of) leadership credibility, but due also to the vicissitudes of Britain's simple plurality or first-past-the-post electoral system which fragments, and thus effectively weakens the impact of, public support enjoyed by the other political parties among British voters.

Thatcher's allocation of cabinet posts and ministerial portfolios

It has become common wisdom that during her premiership, Thatcher appointed a cabinet of “Yes Men”, a perspective ostensibly lent credence by the well-publicized dismissals of prominent critics, usually from the left or One Nation wing of the parliamentary Conservative Party, whose more general ideological weakness is discussed below. During her first term (1979‒83), Thatcher dismissed non-believers such as Mark Carlisle, Ian Gilmour, Lord (Christopher) Soames and Norman St John Stevas, while the Conservatives’ emphatic victory in the 1983 election heralded the sacking of Francis Pym.

The rise of China was always going to ruffle some feathers. Its unique approach to development combines the export- oriented dynamism of East Asian tigers with a resilient authoritarian system that is challenging the idea that democracy and economic development go hand in hand. When China truly went global and Chinese enterprises, interests and political agents started to explore opportunities across the world, the West's ontological security was understandably shaken and fears abounded about China's unchecked ambition. This book is not about the fears of the West but it did attempt to analyze the ambition of China. We collected questions on the BRI from academics, policymakers, businesspeople and professionals from different industries and organized the book accordingly. By studying the excellent academic work of our many colleagues working around the world on the shifting and multifaceted field of the BRI, we assembled a systematic and systemic overview of how China's ambition is changing the face of the world. But the BRI is as much about China's ambition as it is also an outward expression of its domestic system, good and bad included.

The Initiative relies on the decentralized model of governance that encourages actors to pitch projects for approval by the centre, which in turn maintains discipline through fiscal and party- ideological means. While this creates the flexibility needed to fill the gaps left by the centre's vague goals, it can also result in message drift. It is no surprise that the first few years of the BRI saw the words “belt” and “road” pasted on any international event, investment or project hosted by any Chinese entity. Much like with the CCP's other policies, however, the initial flurry of experimentation was brought under control and a winning formula emerged: underneath the big slogans, the BRI has so far been about getting work for China's SOEs by using accumulated foreign exchange to offer loans to developing nations. This point seems obvious by now but it is the key identity marker of the BRI, which will remain an exercise in the internationalization of China's state- owned sector, from builders to banks.

As Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1835, “In times of great political change and rapid political transition, it will generally be observed that political parties find it convenient to re-baptise themselves” (Hutcheon 1913: 217). For the British Tory Party, the early 1830s was such a time. In 1832 the Whig Party – its rival since the late seventeenth century – pushed through a reform of the electoral franchise which marked the first significant step towards democracy in the United Kingdom. If Tories were to compete for office in this new context, they would have to discard their historic label; and “Conservative” seemed the most suitable substitute.

Some important details are missing from the Conservative birth certificate. For many years the parentage was attributed to John Wilson Croker (1780–1857: see Chapter 1), an Irish-born MP and journalist who was closely connected with many influential figures within the Tory Party. It turned out that a more obscure author had pre-empted Croker, using the term “conservative” in an article for the pro-Tory Quarterly Review, in January 1830 (Stewart 1978: 69). Robert Southey referred to “conservative” principles and a conservative party in the same journal the following year (Southey 1831: 315, 317). By the time of the Reform Act the label had been accepted in some unexpected places: even the maniacally partisan Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne (1785–1851) switched from “Tory” to “Conservative” in his diary without missing a beat (Gaunt 2006: 201–202). However, no precise date of birth can be given. Indeed, the word “Tory” continues to be used, either by supporters who are proud of its traditionalist resonances, opponents who find that it fits better than “Conservative” in insulting slogans, or commentators for the sake of variety.

Between the Hanoverian succession in 1714 and the last, unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion of 1745 the name “Tory” had a clear political meaning. It denoted a stickler for the hereditary principle, who hoped for the reinstatement of the Stuart dynasty deposed in 1688–89. However, between the mid-eighteenth century and the late 1820s allusions to a cohesive “Tory Party” must be taken with a pinch of salt, despite the notable scholarship which has been devoted to its history (e.g., Wood 1924; Feiling 1924, 1938).

As we have seen, Thatcher was not yet a Thatcherite when elected as Conservative leader in February 1975, and even by 1979, some of her political ideas were still developing, although her ideological inclination was clearly evident. Thatcherism developed incrementally, in a step-by-step manner, although her strides became longer and quicker as her confidence grew, particularly when she also realized how ineffective her political opponents were, both inside the Conservative Party, and beyond. Thatcherism derived from an eclectic array of individual, institutional and intellectual sources, as well as being facilitated, and in some respects lent credence or credibility, by circumstances and events.

Her disillusionment with the 1970–74 Heath government (in which she had been education secretary) naturally prompted her reconsideration of British Conservatism, and in undertaking this critical reflection, she was strongly influenced and encouraged by the similarly disillusioned Keith Joseph, who introduced her to the key intellectual sources of neoliberalism: Milton Freidman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith. Thatcher already instinctively or intuitively agreed with many of their ideas, but under Joseph's tutelage, and through reading the texts of these neoliberal economists and political theorists, her beliefs became more systematic and substantive.

These ideas were also being proselytized in the 1970s by free-market think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute, established in 1977 (Pirie 2012), and the Institute of Economic Affairs, the latter formed in 1955, but acquiring much greater prominence and credence in the context of the serious economic problems facing Britain in the 1970s (Seldon 1981; Desai 1994). Of course, Thatcher, Joseph and Sherman also formed, in 1974, their own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which promoted what subsequently became Thatcherism. These three think tanks are still active today. The quest for a new or true Conservatism

It was after Edward Heath's Conservative government had lost the February 1974 general election (followed by another Conservative defeat in that year's October general election) that Keith Joseph had his Damascene conversion to what he now considered to be true Conservatism: “it was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism. I had thought that I was a Conservative, but I now see that I was not really one at all” (Joseph 1975: 4).

In hindsight, the only surprising thing about the 1945 general election result was that it surprised so many observers. Almost all of the opinion polls before the campaign suggested a Labour victory, and by common consent the Conservatives performed poorly in a contest which its leaders had not wanted. In part, this was because the Conservative organization was depleted by continuing military commitments, giving rise to the alarming thought that the party would have fared better if its members had taken less interest in the nation's defence.

However, the inevitable inquest covered the product itself as well as the marketing. Writing immediately after the defeat, Quintin Hogg argued that it arose from “a long pent-up and deep-seated revulsion against the principles, practice and membership of the Conservative Party”. Other post-mortems noted “the decline over several decades, of Conservative thought”, and the fact that the party “lacked a doctrine”, having been “be-devilled for years by pseudo-Conservatism” (Hoffman 1964: 27–8). The party's war-winning leader proved worse than useless in rebutting these allegations. Churchill exposed the main reason for his final choice of partisan allegiance in a notorious election broadcast, alleging that socialism could only be imposed on Britain by means of “some kind of Gestapo”. In his own mind this allegation made perfect sense: existing Labour politicians might be patriotic and talented public servants, but if their party won office they would instantly be swept aside by “Bolsheviks”. The MP Cuthbert Headlam, the only one of four Newcastle Conservatives to retain his seat in 1945, shared Churchill's view, even persuading himself that the new foreign secretary Ernest Bevin would seek to appease the Soviet Union. Before the election Headlam had expected his party to fare badly at the hands of “a new electorate which has been brought up on left wing nonsense without any kind of contradiction for five years”. When the Commons reassembled, he found that Baldwin's “hard-faced” contingent of 1918 had been replaced by “half baked young men”, many of whom had risked their lives during the war rather than simply profiting from it (Ball 2000: 472, 460, 470).

Thatcherism has proved to be a controversial, divisive, often contradictory, yet enduring, feature of British politics since the late 1980s, with its legacy and consequences still highly visible today; indeed, perhaps more evident than ever before. To her adherents and admirers, the ideas and policies that constituted Thatcherism, and which were (and still are) faithfully promoted by many of Britain's most widely read daily newspapers, delivered national salvation for a Britain that had experienced economic decline, moral decay and social disorder since the 1960s. Thatcherites would point proudly to achievements, such as lower taxation; wider share ownership; increased homeownership; greatly enhanced individual liberty; much more consumer choice and sovereignty; reduced inflation and the restoration of sound money; curbs on welfare dependency; fewer strikes by trade unions; the ability of individuals to become financially better-off via hard work and entrepreneurship; the breaking-up of inefficient and expensive monopolies in industry, the public sector and local government; a cutting of bureaucracy and red tape; a general “rolling back” of the state to set people free, and allow them to decide for themselves how and where to spend their hard-earned money.

Against this positive interpretation, the critics of Thatcherism would argue that: inequality and poverty have increased exponentially since the 1980s, such that Britain is now characterized by an enormous chasm between the rich and the poor, with many working people reliant on top-up welfare benefits and/or food banks due to poverty wages; for many ordinary people on average incomes, overall taxation has not been reduced, because their income tax cuts were offset (and partly funded) by increases in national insurance and VAT; the deliberate refusal to build social housing has bequeathed today's chronic lack of affordable housing and high private sector rents; labour market flexibility has resulted in worsening terms and conditions of employment, negligible workers’ rights and employment protection, and many workers suffering from debilitating stress or other mental health problems due to increased pressure and performance monitoring in the work place, as well as growing job insecurity and precarity; what is sometimes termed the “gig economy” and a race to the bottom or levelling-down in terms of deteriorating employment conditions and declining pay, even for sections of the middle class.

One of the most interesting aspects of Thatcherism is its contradictory character, and the ways in which it yielded consequences that were incompatible with much of Conservatism more generally. Certainly, many of the socio-economic problems that have increasingly afflicted Britain since the 1990s can, in large part, be attributed to the cumulative or slow-burn consequences of Thatcherite policies, which were then consolidated by John Major's (1990‒97) and subsequent (post-2010) Conservative-led governments. As we noted in the previous chapter, the pursuit of economic neoliberalism and the fetishization of “the market” has continued apace long after the end of Thatcher's premiership, entrenching a British society in which individualism superseded collectivism, people were recast as consumers rather than citizens, and activities were judged primarily in terms of how profitable they were, how far the maximized shareholder values, or, most notably in the public sector, how much (economic) value they added (Dorey 2022).

Of course, the Conservatives were in opposition from 1997 to 2010, but the New Labour governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown only marginally tempered some of the Thatcher–Major governments’ policies, but made no significant or sustained attempt at reversing them, nor did they evince any desire to do so. With the notable exception of the statutory minimum wage, which was introduced at the rate of ￡3.60 per hour, only 10 pence more than the CBI had proposed, but 90 pence less than the ￡4.50 proposed by the TUC, the Blair governments perpetuated, and thus further entrenched, neoliberalism by continuing with the rejection of nationalization and public ownership, pursuit of supply-side economics, marketization, consumerism and hyper-managerialism in education and the NHS, retention of legislative limits on trade union activity and veneration of labour market flexibility, the transformation of erstwhile citizens into customers and consumers, and the a priori premise that the interests of big business were synonymous with the interests of civil society; market mania maximus.

Even the 2008 global financial crisis failed to undermine the hegemony of neoliberalism, although some on the left hoped, and some on the right feared, that it might. On the contrary, the Conservative right immediately recast the 2008 crash as a crisis of social democracy occasioned by New Labour's allegedly excessive public spending.